Don’t Be Cheap Apple!

With Apple vs the FBI, Tim Cook probably has more pressing matters on his mind. But that aside, there’s another reason why 2016 is a big year for Apple. According to rumors, the iPhone 5SE and the iPad Air 3 will be out next month. Also, the iPhone 7 will be released about six months later. Can Apple maintain their dominance in this ultra-competitive market? I don’t know, but they’re not really helping themselves by being cheap with the hardware. While trying to purchase “The Peanuts Movie” on iTunes, I realized that Apple’s short-term profitability can hurt their longterm health.

I have $16.44 in iTunes credit. I was in the mood to watch a new movie. On my Apple TV, I saw a promo for the new “The Peanuts Movie”. I was surprised. The movie was in theaters not too long ago. I wondered, “Is it on DVD already?” It’s not. The disc version of the movie doesn’t hit stores until March 8, 2016. Here was a chance to watch the movie early. Neat!

I grabbed my iPad to download the movie. It has very few apps on it, just the usual Apple stuff and some fairly small games. I figured it would be no problem to download a movie. However, I have the base model iPad Air 2. It only has 16GB of storage space. Surprisingly, I got an error.

Cannot Download

There is not enough available storage to download “The Peanuts Movie”. You can manage your storage in Settings.

So, I launched the “Settings” app and I looked at the “Storage & iCloud Usage” options. It reported that 8.7 GB of data is used, while 3.0 GB of data is Available. Um, that doesn’t equal 16 GB. Where did the other 4.3 GB go?

Also, aside from the “Photos & Camera” app (1.1GB), the top apps consuming space are all Apple – GarageBand (1.0 GB), iMovie (678 MB), Keynote (536 GB), Messages (443 MB), Pages (326 MB) and Numbers (318 MB). This is basic functionality of the device. To use the free software that’s included with the iPad, I don’t have much space to do anything else.

I have other technical issues to worry about. I don’t want to be battling with technology problems on my downtime. It was no-sale for Apple. To save money on hardware, Apple lost money on software.

The base storage on an iPhone 6s (in early 2016) is the same as an iPhone 4 – from late 2010. Not only does this discourage purchases in iTunes, it discourages the purchases of hardware. This problem carries across other Apple lines. A new iPad should not ship with 16GB of storage space. Even worse, a new Mac Mini (base model) ships with a 5400-rpm spinning hard drive. It’s why my Mac Mini (early 2009) model is still competitive with today’s hardware. It was more economical to simply upgrade the hard drive to a solid state.

That’s why 2016 is an important test for Apple. Will they continue to cheap out? With the launch of the iPhone 5SE, iPad Air 3 and then the iPhone 7, the world will see if Apple is still cheap.

2 thoughts on “Don’t Be Cheap Apple!”

UPDATE: While writing this article, I duplicated the steps to reproduce the error. But on this second attempt, the purchase went through. I still couldn’t download the movie, so I deleted GarageBand. That freed up enough space to download the movie. The Peanuts Movie was great. It stayed true to the classic style, while giving it a sharp modern look – cute story too.

The scant amount of memory on modern devices can be appalling at times. A year and a half ago I got a Moto G, a cheap but decent Android phone that had just 8GB of space. And as if that wasn’t little enough, the actual amount of usable space is only 5.5GB. And the phone won’t let you do anything memory-wise with less than 500MB left (it won’t even update Gmail) leaving it with a measly 5 gigabytes of usable memory, and that’s not even counting undeletable apps/files. Pretty much every time I want to install a new app, no matter how small, I have to go find a big app to delete. I don’t get why they couldn’t just have an SD card slot….
Same thing to Apple, too! I don’t see a reason to so drastically limit your memory besides getting an easy $50 for just 16GB extra (at least that’s how it used to be, idk now). C’mon guys, I get that profit is important to a business, but really?